Metmorphoses
His treatise, Edward Topsell declares, “sheweth that Chronicle which was made by God himself, every living beast being a word, every kind being a sentence, and all of them together a large History” (note 1). Vital beings are a language, God’s visible speech, and Topsell’s codex is the world in miniature. The 1658 edition’s signal feature is the heavy bleeding of ink between its leaves’ faces. Such bleeding creates—as this exhibition will show—new beasts, lends them motion, and alters paper to habitat (note 2) Like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The History is a book “Of shapes transformede to bodies straunge” (note 3). Rowland himself invokes the Augustan poet in his dedicatory epistle. Closing the beastly folio, a reader, he writes “may say of it what Ovid did of his Metamorphosis; ... The Work is ended, which can envies fume, / Nor Sword, nor Fire nor wasting time consume” (note 4). The placement of this couplet—an elegant translation of Rowland’s devising—recasts, curiously, the whole of The History as the Metamorphoses. A Christian naturalist could celebrate the pagan poet’s insistence on mutability. For Gesner, as Angela Fischel writes, “[t]he power of nature’s images stems from the multiplicity of natural forms where none is identical with any other” (notes 5 and 6) In a word, “nature is an ever-changing reflection of the unchanging God” (note 7). The codex shared creation’s liveliness. Ink and paper might contribute meanings its makers had not premeditated. The Jacobeans “held the natural and fabricated world,” as Juliet Fleming has observed, “to be structured by a non-propositional intelligence shared with the human mind” (note 8). Theirs was “a mode of knowledge that simultaneously thinks through matter and accords it a sensibility of its own” (note 9). Because it issued, finally, from God, all material was open to human understanding. Books, as John Milton writes in the Areopagitica, “containe a potencie of life,” and the man who destroys them “kills the image of God, as it were, in the eye” (Note 10).
note 1. Edward Topsell, “To the Reverend and Right Worshipful Richard Neile,” The History of Four-Footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects (London: Ellen Cotes for George Sawbridge, Thomas Williams, and Thomas Johnson, 1658), sigs. A7R-A7V.
note 2. Though such bleeding presents throughout the volume, only certain of the images are suggestive of metamorphosis. Many simply occult the text or beasts’ features. Such obscurity must have diminished the folio’s salability.
note 3. Ovid, Metamorphoses, trans. Arthur Golding (Philadelphia: Paul Dry Books, 2000), I.i.
note. 4. John Rowland, “To the Right Honorable the Lord Marquesse of Dorchester,” The History of Four-Footed Beasts, Serpents, and Insects (London: Ellen Cotes for George Sawbridge, Thomas Williams, and Thomas Johnson, 1658), sig. A4R.
note 5. Angela Fischel, “Collections, Images and form in Sixeteenth-Century Natural History: The Case of Conrad Gessner,” Intellectual History Review, 20, no. 1 (2010), 162.
note 6. Like each living being, each copy of The History, is unique. Because, as Randall McLeod has observed, proofing and printing were concurrent, no two copies of any lengthy book produced before the eighteenth century will have precisely the same text. Randall McLeod, “Chronicling Holinshed’s Chronicles,” The peaceable and prosperous regiment of blessed Queene Elisabeth: A Facsimile of Holinshed’s Chronicles (1587), ed. Cyndia Susan Clegg (San Marino: Huntington Library, 2005), 20. The content, that is, of one History will differ, however slightly, from the content of another.
note 7. Fischel, “Collections,” 161.
note 8. Juliet Fleming, Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England (London: Reaktion Books, 2001), 164.
note 9. Ibid.
note 10. John Milton, Areopagitica; A Speech of Mr. John Milton For the Liberty of Vnlicenc’d Printing, To the Parlament of England, (London: [s.n.], 1644), A3V.